Getting the URL of every site a person visits is quite a data mine... not something I'd personally be up for paying for. I have to give AT&T Gigafiber extra money to not track my stuff...
Without trying to be insulting, I think everyone is getting a little too greedy lately with the information they want sent into their "cloud".
I didn't mind it, but I wont miss it either. I usually end up typing my whole search as a matter of "my brain sent these words to my fingers and my fingers are going to type until they are done" kinda thing anyway, so it was a wasted feature
It was good for the time. So were java applets... but, as they say, to everything there is a season, and the sun is season is changing in the web media space..
It's really not comparable. Flash + AS was a RAD environment, many a game developer got their start (and even built full-fledged games[0]) through it. I'd argue that its biggest contributions were not web-bound[1], and I don't know of any other environment which is both as easy to get started with and as flexible.
[0] it's famously the primary expressive environment of Edmund McMillen: Gish, Aether and Binding of Isaac are all Flash though the later got rewritten natively in Rebirth, Super Meat Boy is the native successor to the Flash Meat Boy, The End is Nigh may well be his first game which did not start in Flash (and even that's unclear as it grew from a 2-weeks game jam)
[1] except insofar as they were being embedded/distributed through it e.g. newsgrounds or armorgames
A good bit. Payday loans aren't something anyone wants to do, ever. They are predatory, they know people only turn to them at the last resort (ie, cant feed your kids) so they can charge whatever they want.
The justice comes in the fact that they lose a shit ton of money, because of how sleazy they are, the important credit companies (Equifax, Transunion, etc) wont work with them, so if you don't pay them back, your only loss is not being able to get more payday loans... (there is a specific payday loan/pawn shop loan credit bureau).
So, dont give people shit if they have to take a payday loan, i've been there... i've had to, when i got laid off and went 2 months without income and borrowed from about every family member I could... i basically asked my prior manager to lie and say i still worked there so i could get a loan to feed my family. I'd never walk into one of those places if I werent in dire straits...
Facebook didn't make the area expensive. No tech company did. Those local businesses, and the chains alike, have made it expensive. So much blame gets put on the tech companies, but the tech companies aren't raising the prices, they are just paying people better, and the local businesses abuse that to the fullest extent. There is no NEED to charge $6 for a gallon of milk, when milk from those same cows is sold for $2 50 miles away... thats not a SV valley tech company problem, its a SV valley retailer problem, and the blame needs to shift that way...
> Facebook didn't make the area expensive. No tech company did. Those local businesses, and the chains alike, have made it expensive. So much blame gets put on the tech companies, but the tech companies aren't raising the prices, they are just paying people better, and the local businesses abuse that to the fullest extent. There is no NEED to charge $6 for a gallon of milk, when milk from those same cows is sold for $2 50 miles away... thats not a SV valley tech company problem, its a SV valley retailer problem, and the blame needs to shift that way...
You're attacking a false target. Buying food in the bay area isn't expensive. Rent and housing is expensive. There's a great Costco in mountain view that charges the same prices as Costco most other places. Similar for other grocery options.
When I lived there last year, our food bills were comparable to living in Pittsburgh. Our rent on a 3br/1ba house, not renovated since 1956, with a portable dishwasher in the garage... was 50% more than my mortgage is in Pittsburgh for a decent size house in a lovely little neighborhood 3/4 of a mile from my work. It was rather shocking.
It's a combination of high salaries and crappy housing policy leading to an explosion in property costs.
Yeah, I found that to be pretty much true. Of course there are plenty more options (organic/natural/raw) if you WANT to spend more, but no intrinsic cost increase.
But there are a lot of marginal cost increases in the Bay vs other places. Car insurance is more expensive. Gas is more expensive. Simple one-offs (like oil changes) are more expensive. You're more likely to eat out because of the brutal commute times. Etc.
That's very very backwards. Local business are charging $6 for milk because they have to make enough profit to pay rent. The soaring rent is absolutely due to high-salary tech work; the bay area existed for decades without these significant rent issues.
Your assumption is the "local businesses" own their property. I don't know many small grocery chains that own their lots. "All boats rise with the tide". High demand for residential means commercial and industrial zoned lots will also increase in value/rent/lease.
Or... we place the blame on being in bad places where the blame belongs.
If I throw $10,000 over the white house fence and you jump the fence to get to it, its still YOUR problem and YOU are the one at fault for being where you arent supposed to be.
Place the blame on the people who disregard the rules, the game isnt responsible because it placed something there.
This would be like... "Hey, you shot a deer in the middle of the street downtown during deer season, i guess its not your fault that you were hunting deer in the middle of the street, there was a deer here afterall..."
> If I throw $10,000 over the white house fence and you jump the fence to get to it, its still YOUR problem and YOU are the one at fault for being where you arent supposed to be.
Actually, I'm fairly sure throwing objects over the White House fence without some authority is also illegal, so in your example both parties would legally be at fault.
Interesting how this went through up and downvotes.
Yet no one telling me why I am wrong.
There are so many ways to dodge rules with money. One could be a diplomat and immune, claim it was a campaign donation to get the favor and therefor lenience of the incumbent, use the rest of the money to hire suberb lawyers to drag the case out forever, Since its the presidents lawn a presidential pardon might help or of any of the other ways were having a ton of wealth simply provides more options.
Blame in the sense of figuring out who is the person responsible for the offense is very important. If you don't know within who lies the responsibility, you don't know how to fix it.
IF the problem is littering, you fine littering people more. IF the problem is trampling flora, then rope off areas or add signage to prevent walking in certain areas and ENFORCE those rules...
Isn't this basically the philosophy that gave birth to the US war on drugs? Blame-and-punish is not necessarily a better policy than prevention and mitigation.
Why not both? It seems inefficient to give citations to the waves of newcomers every day.
What if we found that a simple change by app developers could drastically reduce property damage. Wouldn't it be in everybody's interest to have that change implemented?
I think you are buying in too much to the city's legal arguments, which by definition are hyperbolic.
The locations of Pokestops and gyms in Pokémon Go derive from crowd sourced locations used in Ingress, Niantic's earlier AR game. These locations are generally in publicly accessible places. The geofencing on pokestops is also not that tight - there is never really a good reason to stray off of paths in a park to reach a Pokestop. You might have to walk on the grass if the Pokestop were, say, a statue in the middle of a field, but it's a park, that's what you do.
It's worth noting that in cases where pokestops are located in particularly sensitive locations, like inside hospital wards or at church altars, Niantic has indeed de-activated or re-located them.
My main point is, people trampling flowers are acting badly, either that or the flowers are growing in a place where people are allowed to walk ...
The location in question is a public park that's normally quiet, but people decided it was a good area for Pokémon hunting. It's a public park, thats well within their rights. Ita not at all obvious that Niantic CAN do anything in a case like this, nor SHOULD they be expected to.
Funny how for the longest time now, cities and counties take more and more money from public parks citing their underuse... then when they get used, they cry out legally to stop the use.
Part of the costs of a park is cleaning up after people, its already in the budget. So is the landscaping. So is the coverage for wear and tear in general.
Its also funny to see the difference. National Park Service embraces Pokemon Go and enjoyed the increased park traffic. Austin embraced it and stores all over downtown and even government buildings had specials for Pokemon GO'ers (some public art museums here gave like 50% off admission if you were Pokemon hunting)
And the fact that so many normally sedentary people were getting up and going out and doing shit and getting exercise .. and people still went out of their way to be dicks about it... I don't get it.
Aside from Niantic's handling of the game, its PR and its issues, the pokemon GO craze was probably one of the most positive, healthy things to go viral in a very long time in the US...
For some background into the phenomenon that was Lake Park last summer, there was a large concentration of Pokestops around Lake Park in a relatively small area. In Pokemon GO there are geographic boundaries that make up biomes in the game which determine which Pokemon to spawn, for instance if you're near a source of water there is a high chance you will encounter water Pokemon. Lake Park appeared to not have any biome, which led to anything from the game being able to appear, including more rare types of Pokemon. Pokemon GO also has something called a lure module that players can place down which will attract more Pokemon to a Pokestop for 15 minutes. All these factors working together caused a massive influx of players to Lake Park from players from the greater Milwaukee and nearby Waukesha counties.
The area surrounding Lake park has affluent people living around there (homes valued in the range of $500k - $950k), and the Lake Park Bistro upscale restaurant was just north of the park with the largest parking lot closest to the concentration of Pokestops. Prior to Pokemon GO it was a quiet area with a great view of Lake Michigan from many of the homes along Lake Drive.
I'm inclined to believe that it was not only a combination of the holy grail Pokemon GO location for the greater Milwaukee area, but also a bit of "Not In My Backyard" [1] that led to the augmented reality game ordinance.
I spent a lot of time at lake Park for pokemon go almost exactly a year ago! It was basically a huge party and a great example of how AR could bring people together.
I was traveling a lot through the Midwest last summer and there were hoards of people staring at their phones while actively walking around in about a dozen states.
It was wonderful to watch.
I can't wait to see what form of communal AR we see develop over the next 10 years.
Local government in places with a waterfront is almost completely made up of people who have a special interest to champion and spends 90% of it's time bickering about said interests.
Wear and tear and cleaning up isn't some binary budgeted-or-not thing. You can expect a certain flow and behaviour, and something can radically change that. If some popular band said they were doing a goodbye concert and it was only available in AR at a park, you can bet it'd cause far more wear and tear in one day than they budgeted for a long time.
But trying to block the AR game is the wrong approach. They should instead implement a generic way to handle such things. Either fine people, or have some maximum occupancy rules.
In my town it increased traffic (and road accidents). Players would drive up to the nearest Pokestop, collect their loot, and drive to the next one. I saw more than a few drivers make sudden turns or stops when an interesting spawn would occur. I don't really miss the craze.
It just increased general phone usage by ~16% per day. Daily path length stayed the same.
(Source: study on 2800 phone users that played Pokemon GO. Data collected for at least 4 weeks having the first gaming session in the middle. Data was collected through an app that monitors your phone usage, no self-reported data. Will be presented at MobileHCI '17)
Too small a sample size for physical activity (fine for HCI, though) and was probably orchestrated after the hype of it. Does this paper live in those parameters?
Initial sample size was 21k users but we've reduced it to the people that filled some questionnaire regarding demographics and personality traits. To which parameters are you referring?
I suspect that down the line, some group of clever people will design something like Pokemon GO, but with some real meat on its bones and a long, monetized lifetime. At that point, you have to wonder if there will be a measurable hit on childhood obesity. I suspect there might be, albeit relatively small, still a measurable reduction.
If VR gets broadly popular it might also have some effect in this direction, since the most popular games so far (Echo Arena, Job Simulator, Climbey, etc) all require a fair bit of arm and body movement. It's not the most intense exercise, but it's way better than nothing, especially since the engagement of it means looking forward to it rather than dreading it as unpleasant exercise.
>> City officials were aghast at large numbers of individuals playing Pokemon Go who visited parks, littered, trampled grass and flowers, and stayed past park hours.
This seems like a legitimate issue though. How do you propose it be solved?
Staying past park hours for the most part is dumb... as far as being a big deal, its not. People walking around trying to play a game after hours is no something that needs policing in the first place...
Is the game responsible for people littering? Or tramping grass (seriously, its grass... lets get over ourselves) or flowers... Is the game responsible for that, or are the people who do the wrong thing responsible? This points at the overall shifting of blame for everything that is becoming so common in our culture... put the blame on the person who does the wrong thing.
If you leave parks open at night you have to provide quite a bit extra policing. Otherwise they get taken over by hookers and junkies, and normal people won't go there. That kind of policing is the first thing that gets cut when cities run out of money, at least in my area, so they close the parks at night.
In my city they close the small parks (1-10 blocks, surrounded by cast iron railings) but can't do anything about the huge park that covers several square kilometres and has important roads running through it. There are some hookers and junkies and doggers there at night, but they have to go somewhere and they don't bother the "normal people" who are, after all, tucked up in bed at that time.
All this suggests that locking parks overnight is more about every government's burning desire to "think of the children" and control everything possible than any legitimate concern for public safety.
Thats a bad argument... There are plenty of places that rules in place to prevent "homeless tent encampments" from being a thing. The same laws that prevent you from camping in city parks. Thats a bad example...
>> This seems like a legitimate issue though. How do you propose it be solved?
> Is the game responsible for people littering?
I feel like you didn't answer my question?
Edit, to clarify: I'm asking what the actual solution is: expecting the city to pay for skyrocketing enforcement? Or letting the park get trashed and then blaming the citizens? Or just closing the park and blaming people for it happening? etc.
How does that answer the question? I'm asking how to solve problem, the response is who needs to receive the blame?
Edit: See edit above. The question isn't whom to blame, the question is how to resolve the issue. Blaming people doesn't generally resolve an issue, but enforcing it or putting in place mechanisms for preventing it or some other tangible action might.
While I agree, I think the problem is affording blaming the person who does the wrong thing.
Perhaps more permanent solution to the problem is in order such as fencing around the flowers getting trampled. End the drug war if you want to save money elsewhere for this.
Large numbers of people visiting part sounds like a success - the only purpose why the park exists in the first place is so that the residents can go there and visit, so if they're doing it more than before then the park is achieving it's goal and it's great!
It would be reasonable to expect that the job of these city officials should be to (a) encourage the people to visit parks even more; and (b) maintain the parks adequately to their usage - if people use the parks more then it obviously costs more to maintain, but it also obviously means that people are getting more benefit from the parks and they want them to be maintained more.
Enforcing the rules about littering and trampling flowers is part of maintaining the park; but if people are routinely staying past park hours (the whole concept of park hours is a bit strange to me, I'd expect parks to simply be unserviced but otherwise available 24/7), then likely that's a sign that these hours should be extended - the purpose of littering restrictions is obvious but the only legitimate purpose of restricted hours is that the population wants the hours to be restricted for safety reasons or whatever; if now it turns out that the population doesn't want that restriction anymore, then it shouldn't exist.
I agree with you entirely about the success but I don't think that implies a lack of a failure. Yes, the entire point of a park is for people to visit, and I love that people are doing that, but "visiting" a public place is not the same as trashing it. Especially given that there are rare flora there -- the point is for people to be able to enjoy them, not destroy them. How do you respond to that? Do you just think "who cares about rare plants, just plant grass or everyday flowers or something", or do you think there's value to having something less commonplace? Obviously these all need care, and fining people doesn't really fix the problem of letting the plants grow, since when the crowd is large there's always going to be someone messing something up, even if it's a small percentage of the people.
They weren't there though to enjoy there park they were there because of the game. Not even because the park is a great environment to play there have but because the game encouraged to be in that place. If the game had put all the rare Pokemon in a parking lot that's probably were people would have gone. Were people there to enjoy nature? I doubt it.
They enjoyed the park because they were able to play the game in a nice park instead of on that parking lot. The park is there so that people can spend time in a nicer place, and it is "doing its job" no matter if they're just walking there, having a picnic, playing ball, sitting on a bench, jogging or playing a game.
I was just pointing out that "enforcing rules against littering, using parks after hours, etc." isn't the solution to them, they see it as the problem.
I don't quite understand the issue. It's the government's job to keep up public infrastructure regardless of how heavily it's used—that's something the left _and_ right can agree on.
I specifically omitted my own value judgement so it's amusing to see value judgements projected upon me via downvotes and snarky comments. If you think a neutral restatement of commonly trumpeted goals and their direct outcomes is a political jab then I think it says more about you than it does about me.
Judgement does not need to be blatant in a statement for it to have been cast. At any rate, I think my response was sufficient in that I don't really care which party has control of the pocketbook, they both have an obligation to spend money on infrastructure and they both find ways not to, even if it's a common goal.
A common method supported by the right (especially the libertarian right) is to sell off the (non-defense, non-law-enforcement) infrastructure, so that it is no longer a public thing that government needs to maintain.
the national parks are almost fully funded by the people that visit them.
I do not use any of the Local Parks, I do not pay Pokemon Go, I do not have a use for either
People that use the parks should pay for them, then if there is an increase in activity from something like Pokemon Go that means Revenue also increases to pay for the increased costs to maintain the asset.
Unfortunately, if parks were mostly paid by the people using them, we would have no parks. Most people won't pay to use a park, and would instead just no go. Additionally, it's often extremely difficult to force people to pay to use your park. It's different with national parks which people travel to for the sole purpose of going to the park, but local parks, lakes, etc will have a much more difficult time making people pay for it.
>>Unfortunately, if parks were mostly paid by the people using them, we would have no parks.
I am fine with that, it is not ethical to take money from people by force to pay for things like this, if their was value in the community for a park then the community would find a way to voluntarily pay for it, if there are not enough voluntary support in the community to fund the park then the park should not exist
You should check out the parks/beaches in some towns in Westchester and CT (e.g. around Greenwich). It is a disgrace that they have people sitting there enforcing access (e.g. residency).
> the national parks are almost fully funded by the people that visit them.
Even if that were true, National parks are big, which means the additional space taken up by toll collection infrastructure at parking areas (and the staff to man them) aren't a big deal, and they present lots of needs for people to stop and buy things which creates concession opportunities.
This is significantly less true of most (but not all) local parks.
But, anyway, even National Parks funding comes mostly from appropriated funds; fees (both directly from visitors and commercial services) are on the order of a couple hundred million of the single-digit billion dollar annual parks spendibf. And even that amount actually spent doesn't meet upkeep needs; the National Parks have deferred maintenance costs on the order of four times the annual budget.
selectively enforcing laws against Pokemon players... E.g. enforcing parking hours including threatening to immediately tow cars except they'd ignore cars in the same lot that looked like they would belong to patrons of the restaurant frequented by the area elites.
then when they get used, they cry out legally to stop the use.
The parks weren't just being "used", people were littering, staying after hours, trampling on flowerbeds and stuff. Or did you miss that part of the article?
So many normally sedentary people were getting up and going out and doing shit and getting exercise .. and people still went out of their way to be dicks about it... I don't get it.
Say what you want about the city's misguided attempts at enforcement. But by no means was it in response to "normally sedentary people getting exercise."
> The parks weren't just being "used", people were littering, staying after hours, trampling on flowerbeds and stuff. Or did you miss that part of the article?
These are problems that any park that has high traffic has to deal with. The judge offered reasonable solutions that didn't involve dissuading people from using the park.
> But my no means was it in response to "normally sedentary people getting exercise."
From the article: "Requiring Candy Lab to secure insurance, portable restrooms, security, clean-up, and provide a timeline for an 'event'"
That is very directly a response to normally sedentary people getting exercise - the city wants them out of the park.
These are problems that any park that has high traffic has to deal with.
No, they're not problems of "high traffic". That would be things like too many people on the lawn above intended capacity, and what not.
The point is that by any common sense definition, the kinds of activities noted by the authorities constitute "abuse", not "use" (as there is no intended allowance of things like trampling flower beds, etc, at any level of capacity). And hence, in any place where you have actual working municipal governance, you'll find that they're dealt with appropriately.
If you don't see the importance of this distinction -- sorry, but you're very confused.
The fact that so many of the comments here are focused on running and its pros/cons and not on the actual point of the article (self control) ... its kinda strange for HN to completely miss the point by such a big margin...
Normally, I find belly-aching about something not looking right or not working right because NoScript is on is silly.
But I find it astounding that this page requires javascript to display the text of a _blog post_. What is so important that your site completely shits the bed and fails so badly that it shows nothing but a white screen.
Frankly, I think Shopify just purposely sabotages the page because they want you to enable javascript so they can enable analytics and track you across their sites.
Not to mention they load code from Google APIs, Google Analytic, Shopify.com, Embed.ly, Gfycat.com, and Mlveda.com, which means I'm suddenly running code from websites I never intended on visiting. Why should visiting https://fymhotsauce.rocks send a road flare to all those services?
You're right, this is the new normal, but it's shit and we should be complaining.
That's not why the site is broken if you're using uBlock/NoScript. It's broken because it loads everything (even the text of the site) from 3rd party domains and scripts.
Without trying to be insulting, I think everyone is getting a little too greedy lately with the information they want sent into their "cloud".